Refused a place at Highfields School?
In 2026/27, Highfields School offered 214 places and 211 families named it as their first choice.
Below: what an appeal in Derbyshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
211 first preferences for 214 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Highfields School
There is no published appeal success rate for Highfields School, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Derbyshire as a whole and cover every state-funded school in the authority. Anyone quoting you odds for a named school is making them up.
Across Derbyshire, 29.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 185 of 620 appeals heard in 2024–2026. The England figure is 20.1%.
A panel is not deciding whether you want the school. It decides whether the admission arrangements were lawful and correctly applied, and then whether the harm to your child of not being admitted outweighs the harm to the school of going over its published number. Cases built on preference rather than on those two questions are the ones that fail.
See the full appeal figures for Derbyshire.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Derbyshire ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
Highfields School turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 201 | 195 | 195 | 0.97 |
| 2016/17 | 172 | 158 | 158 | 0.92 |
| 2017/18 | 197 | 194 | 194 | 0.98 |
| 2018/19 | 188 | 182 | 182 | 0.97 |
| 2019/20 | 190 | 179 | 179 | 0.94 |
| 2020/21 | 198 | 188 | 188 | 0.95 |
| 2021/22 | 209 | 205 | 205 | 0.98 |
| 2022/23 | 223 | 201 | 201 | 0.9 |
| 2023/24 | 220 | 217 | 217 | 0.99 |
| 2024/25 | 182 | 179 | 179 | 0.98 |
| 2025/26 | 203 | 205 | 198 | 1.01 |
| 2026/27 | 214 | 211 | 211 | 0.99 |
Places offered
214
in 2026/27
Named first choice
211
371 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
100%
211 of 211
Offers to families outside the council
1%
2 of 214 offers
This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 112950.
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria Highfields School published for 2025 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | A current 'looked after child' or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements, or special guardianship order including those who appear [to the admission authority] to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions. |
| 2 | Children living in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission who have brothers or sisters attending the school at the time of application and admission |
| 3 | Children living in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission 4. Children not living in the normal area served by the school but who have brothers or sisters attending the school at the time of application and admission |
| 4 | In the case of voluntary controlled church schools, children whose parents request a place on religious grounds |
| 5 | Other children whose parents have requested a place When in the case of 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 above, choices have to be made between children satisfying the same criteria, those children living nearest to the school (measured by straight line distance) will be given preference. Admission to the sixth form (including admission number for those admitted for the first time) The admission number for the sixth form for all candidates will be 125. GCSEs are an important indicator of how students are likely to achieve at A Level. Entry requirements for study in the sixth form are set out below. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 6 | Looked after and previously looked after children, in accordance with the School Admissions Code 2014, which states that all admission authorities must give highest priority to this group of children. Further details can be found under the ‘Definitions’ section in this policy. |
| 7 | Children who already attend the school and meet the academic entry criteria. |
| 8 | Children who do not presently attend the school and meet the academic entry criteria. In the event of an over-subscription of the above criteria, proximity to the school will be used with those living nearer being given priority. Distance measurements are measured by a standard straight line distance calculated to within two metres. This measurement is taken from the postal address file, normally the house front door. For Highfields School, the grid reference is taken from the nearest gate or entrance to the school’s lower site - Starkholmes. This applies equally to those living inside and outside the County’s boundary. No priority is given to siblings in this criteria. |
The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.
Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal
A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.
So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.
These are the criteria determined for 2025 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.
Highfields School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.
Was the school full?
This is the question a panel spends most of its time on. At the second stage of an appeal it weighs the harm to the school of taking an extra child against the harm to your child of being refused — and how much room the school has is the heart of that. The admission authority has to show harm over and above the fact that its published number has been reached, so it is fair to ask what the specific harm is — how the second stage actually works.
Places, Years 7 to 11
1,091
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,088
99.7% of capacity
Unfilled places
3
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
175
excluded from the figures above
Read this before you use these numbers
These are whole-school figures across Years 7 to 11, not the year group you are appealing for. A school can hold spare places in its upper years while the year you want is genuinely full, and the panel will have the year-group numbers in front of it. So this does not show that Highfields School has room for your child.
They are also the school's own reported capacity, as at 1 May 2025 — a year behind the application figures further up this page, and a description rather than a finding.
On the published figures Highfields School reported 3 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.7% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.
Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Derbyshire does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Derbyshire
Postcode DE4 5NA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 148299).
Other contested secondary schools in Derbyshire
- Wilsthorpe School 1.33 first choices per place
- St Mary's Catholic High School, A Catholic Voluntary Academy 1.31 first choices per place
- The Bolsover School 1.20 first choices per place
- Chapel-en-le-Frith High School 1.17 first choices per place
- Granville Academy 1.12 first choices per place
- David Nieper Academy 1.11 first choices per place
- Ormiston Ilkeston Enterprise Academy 1.09 first choices per place
- Brookfield Community School 1.06 first choices per place
Applications and offers: Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27. Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England. Both under the Open Government Licence.